You know that moment of amazed surprise when you encounter something so unexpected that it feels almost magical? Maybe a rush of beauty, or an experience of transcendence, or an idea that blows your mind.
Wonder Cabinet is a podcast that revels in these experiences of wonder. It’s the new audio project from Anne Strainchamps and Steve Paulson, the creators of the Peabody Award-winning public radio show To The Best Of Our Knowledge. For more than 30 years, they’ve been talking with many of the world’s greatest scientists, poets and philosophers. Now, they’re going deeper, with longer, more intimate interviews about the mystery of the cosmos, the deep intelligence of the Earth, and ideas to re-enchant everyday life.
Wonder Cabinet takes its name from the cabinets of curiosities that were famous throughout Enlightenment Europe. They were private collections amassed by princes and scholars — elaborate displays of shells, whale bones and saints’ relics, along with astronomical clocks and anatomical drawings. Those early wonder cabinets sit at a moment in history when the Scientific Revolution was still in conversation with an older magical worldview.
Today, another revolution in thinking is taking shape, as mechanistic and hierarchical models of nature give way to more holistic, relational ways of seeing the world. And that’s where Wonder Cabinet comes in. It’s a collection, not of objects, but of conversations with people who are mining their own sense of wonder about the natural world and different dimensions of consciousness. Some study black holes or quantum entanglement; others map mycelial networks and explore dream worlds. They might write about myths and fairy tales, the history of utopias, or the wisdom of William James. Together, they’re shaping a new story for our own time.
We’re living through a period of turbulent change, so there's a question we’re asking: what would happen if we let wonder be our guide — not as an escape from reality, but as a way to inhabit it more deeply? How do we build a cabinet of wonders for our own age?
Who will you hear on Wonder Cabinet? Here are some of the people we’ll talk with in our first season: Carlo Rovelli on radical politics and quantum gravity; George Saunders on the liminal space between life and death; Sophie Strand on monarch migration and fungal gods; Rebecca Solnit on finding hope in a time of civilization change; Robert Macfarlane on the deep memory of rivers; Manvir Singh on the history of shamanism; Rebecca Henderson on reimagining capitalism in a new climate age; Christof Koch on the phenomenology of psychedelics; and Bianca Stone on poetry as a family inheritance.
Welcome to Wonder Cabinet!
Anne Strainchamps
Anne is a Peabody Award-winning public radio journalist and podcaster. She is the former host and co-founder of To The Best Of Our Knowledge, a 35-year long public radio “magazine of ideas” broadcast on more than 200 public radio stations. Her interviews with scientists, philosophers, writers and artists from the US, UK and Europe are featured in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting at the Library of Congress. She was a founding producer of The Diane Rehm Show at WAMU, a news director at Wisconsin Public Radio, creator of the Emmy-winning Wisconsin Life essay series, and host of 45 North, a live call-in show. She lives in Madison, WI and Vershire, VT with her husband and co-producer, Steve Paulson. They have two grown children and a corgi named Alfie.
Steve Paulson
Steve is a Peabody Award-winning journalist and podcaster based in Madison, WI and Vershire, VT. He was the co-founder and executive producer of the public radio show To The Best Of Our Knowledge. He’s also the host of Luminous, a podcast about the science, philosophy and culture of psychedelics. His radio stories have been broadcast on NPR, and he’s written for Nautilus, Salon, Slate and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His book, Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion and Science, was published by Oxford University Press. For more than a decade, Steve organized and moderated an annual series of public events at the New York Academy of Sciences, including Rethinking Mortality, From Knowledge to Wisdom and The Emerging Science of Consciousness. He’s also moderated panels at the International Forum on Consciousness in Madison for more than a dozen years.